Reviews: Clarke, Cassandra Rose

Our Lady of the Ice —
Cassandra Rose Clarke

Cassandra
Rose Clarke’s 2015’s Our
Lady of the Ice
takes us to an alternate history, one in which Argentinean
entrepreneurs have built an amusement park in Antarctica. Hope City
was once profitable, but that golden age is long gone. These days the
city ekes out a living selling power from their atomic reactor. Life
in a marginally viable city in a polar wasteland is desperate. The
only thing keeping the community from vanishing in a puff of economic
logic is that most of the poor saps in Hope City cannot afford the
cost of a visa and a ticket back to the mainland.

The
current state of affairs suits Mr. Cabrera just fine. The gangster
legitimate
businessman’s entire business model is based on exploiting a trapped
population. Marianella Luna’s scheme to supplement imported food with
produce from local agricultural domes threatens his bottom line. She
is keeping the domes secret, but Cabrera suspects that something is
going on. Luna is at the top of his personal enemies list.

But
covert agricultural domes are not Luna’s only secret, and that’s
where private detective Eliana Gomez comes in.